Posts Tagged "un/cefact"
SBR Linking Specification – SBR-LS
Yesterday Harm Jan van Burg, the Program Director of the Standard Business Reporting Program in the Netherlands, and I gave a presentation to UN/CEFACT’s TBG17 about SBR-LS, a specification that I have been working on in the last few months and that will be submitted to the UN/CEFACT’s Core Components Library by the end of this year.
SBR-LS is a single, standardized format to represent the links, the mapping and the conversion between data in any format – mainly standardized formats, but also proprietary – and at any level of summarization in the business reporting and audit supply chain.
We all know that multiple standardized data formats exist in the business/accounting/financial space, and that different, and sometimes overlapping, standards provide features that are useful for different purposes. Also, institutional preferences or constraints may impose different choices in different environments – like industries, jurisdictions, the public sector. All these factors limit the achievement of real convergence towards one, or even a few, standards.
In this situation, the ability of linking and connecting data in different formats and at different levels of aggregation/summarization - without imposing the conversion to a single format, but enabling it where necessary or desired – is a key enabler of the real benefits of standardization. Most or all standards focus on a single step of any process: for example the standardization of trade transactions, e-Invoicing, or financial reporting. But converting a paper document to an electronic format, which is what most standards aim to achieve, is simply not enough, because it does not allow the re-engineering of the process of which those single steps are part, which is the real enabler of greater efficiencies and significant cost reductions for businesses and Government.
This is the gap that SBR-LS is designed to fill. The value of the concept behind SBR-LS has been partially proven within XBRL Global Ledger, which supports the connection of XBRL data at different levels of summarization with its Summary Reporting Contextual Data (SRCD) module, currently in Public Working Draft status. Indeed XBRL GL promises, with some further enhancement of its already solid capabilities to link to source documents, to be a very suitable and immediately available implementation technology for SBR-LS. On the other end, UN/CEFACT is the ideal “home” for the more generic specification, and I look forward to completing the submission and to publish the first prototype implementation of an SBR-LS compliant processor in the upcoming months.
The presentation that I gave to TBG17 can be seen below (click to enlarge). Please leave a comment if you are interested and want to know more.
UN/CEFACT Forum in Sapporo, Japan
Japan is a focal point for XBRL GL adoption, and I look forward to spending one week in Sapporo for the 15th UN/CEFACT Forum – September 28 to October 2 - where I will be working with TBG17.
I will then move on to Tokyo where there will be various meetings related with some current and future implementations of XBRL GL. Stay tuned for more details!
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